Repertory: Guerrilla Drama

“We try in our own humble way,” says Ronnie Davis, director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, “to destroy the United States,” That is the modest ambition of several groups of strolling players who consider themselves collectively to be proponents of “guerrilla theater,” Performing on street corners or on flatbed trucks, earning their keep by pass-the-hat collections, these dramatic revolutionaries have but one purpose: to “radicalize” their audiences into action and rebellion, Recently, three of the best-known guerrilla organizations —the Mime Troupe, New York City’s Bread and Puppet Theater and California’s El Teatro Campesmo—gathered at San Francisco State College for a five-day “theatrical orgy” of radical plays.

To these revolutionary performers, the heart of drama is political or social “confrontation,” Repelled by what they consider to be the sterile fantasy land of conventional playhouses, the guerrilla troupes prefer the realism of open-air settings for dramatizing their message to children, students, workers and activists. Naturally, the values of the Broadway stage are anathema to them. “You cannot respond to junk like Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller,” insists Luis Valdez, an alumnus of the Mime Troupe and founder of El Teatro Campesino. “Art is communication. The more artful you are, the more straight-telling you are.” This is roughly the esthetic theory of the poster or the comic strip, and guerrilla theater is hardly more subtle; radical drama willingly sacrifices art for impact, nuance for message, plot for propaganda.

Plastic Mentality. Oldest of the guerrilla theaters is the Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by Davis, who had studied mime in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. Initially, he and his company of 23 performers—as with most of the guerrilla troupes, few have had any previous professional experience—specialized in silent, Chaplinesque skits. Despite its name, the troupe has since broken loudly into song and speech; and its repertory, performed around the country, includes Renaissance commedia dell’arte, Moliere farces and group-created modern morality plays with so much bawdry that the actors have been arrested by local authorities for obscenity. At the festival, the troupe’s musicians, who call themselves the “Gorilla Band,” offered a blatantly sardonic, nose-thumbing rendition of favorite American songs like Yankee-Doodle The plays included an antiwar skit with the central image of a crutch topped by a meat grinder, a 15th century farce about the evils of the profit system and a puppet show featuring little black panthers and a little white “fuzz.”

No less a dramatic polemicist is Peter Schumann, 34, a German sculptor and choreographer who came to the U.S. seven years ago and organized the Bread and Puppet Theater. Schumann and his fellow actors perform mostly in New York City slums where, since receiving a grant two years ago, they run workshops in which ghetto children can make puppets. Before each performance, the company tears fresh loaves of pumpernickel into bits and passes them through the audience—an artistic communion that both engages the viewers’ participation and sets the group’s humanistic tone. “All of our shows are for good and against evil,” insists Schumann. They are played in stark terms. In Reiteration, the actors wear grotesque masks; one wears a skull, another a gas mask, others are in oriental or black face, While Schumann announces each scene, the actors walk through a slow-motion allegory condemning the Viet Nam war.

Making Noise. Where the Bread and Puppet Theater leaves off, El Teatro Campesino (the Farm Workers’ Theater) begins. It does not simply point out evil but demands immediate action to eradicate it. An example of contemporary folk art, the Teatro has traveled the dusty roads of California’s San Joachin Valley for three years, giving artistic moral support to the strike of César Chávez’s Mexican-American grape pickers. The players encourage a revivalist atmosphere of hand clapping and shouting. “We like to make noise,” says Director Valdez, who studied drama at San Jose State College, “because society does not allow us to make noise.” Like Valdez, most of the other guerrilla players are convinced that sooner or later they will all be heard.